Twine 2 (Harlowe) and Phonegap / Cordova

Posted: March 18, 2016

As I discussed yesterday, I’ve started writing computer games. Of course, it’s important to me that people are able to play the game on whatever platform they have access to. As such, I’ve spent a fair amount of time planning to optimize my game UI for mobile devices, and researching the best methods for repackaging webapps as native apps.

One solution I’ve found is Apache Cordova / Adobe Phonegap. Cordova is an open source project from the Apache team that lets you access native phone features from web apps, and re-package those web apps as native applications. Phonegap is Adobe’s suite of tools for working with Cordova. (Except that’s an oversimplifcation, but we’ll ignore it for now.)

The important thing is this: I discovered after a few minutes of tinkering that Twine 2’s default story format (Harlowe) can be re-packged in to a spiffy native application using Phone Gap. I was able to start a game, and play it through to completion. What’s more, my Mobile CSS (after a few quick tweaks) looked great!

I haven’t had the chance to play with things much beyond this, but I’m looking forward to exploring the capabilities of Apache Cordova! I guess I’ll be registering for an Apple Developer Account and an Android Developer account in the near future, which are expenses I’m not looking forawrd to, but beyond that this is pretty exciting.